Automated Interpretation Tool for Synchronous History Matching of Multiple Scal Experiments with Advance Nurbs Representations of Relevant Functions

Abstract

Relative permeability and capillary pressure are the key parameters of the multiphase flow in a reservoir. To ensure an accurate determination of these functions in the areas of interest, the core flooding and centrifuge experiments on the relevant core samples need to be interpreted meticulously. In this work, relative permeability and capillary pressure functions are determined synchronously by history matching of multiple experiments simultaneously in order to increase the precision of results based on additional constraints coming from extra measurements. To take into account the underlying physics without making crude assumptions, the Special Core Analysis (SCAL) experiments are chosen to be simulated instead of using well know simplified analytical or semi-analytical solutions. Corresponding numerical models are implemented with MRST (Lie, 2019) library. The history matching approach is based on the adjoint gradient method for the constrained optimization problem. Relative permeability and capillary pressure curves, which are the objectives of history matching, within current implementation can have a variety of representations as Corey, LET, B-Splines and NURBS. For the purpose of analyzing the influence of correlations on the history matching results in this study, the interpretation process with assumed analytical correlations is compared to history matching based on generic NURBS representation of relevant functions.